Featured Research

from universities, journals, and other organizations

Lab-engineered kidney project reaches early milestone

Date:

June 21, 2012

Source:

Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center

Summary:

Regenerative medicine researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center have reached an early milestone in a long-term project that aims to build replacement kidneys in the lab to help solve the shortage of donor organs.

Share This

Regenerative medicine researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center have reached an early milestone in a long-term project that aims to build replacement kidneys in the lab to help solve the shortage of donor organs.

Related Articles

In proof-of-concept research published online ahead of print in Annals of Surgery, the team successfully used pig kidneys to make "scaffolds" or support structures that could potentially one day be used to build new kidneys for human patients. The idea is to remove all animal cells -- leaving only the organ structure or "skeleton." A patient's own cells would then be placed on the scaffold, making an organ that the patient theoretically would not reject.

While this is one of the first studies to assess the possibility of using whole pig kidneys to engineer replacement organs, the idea of using organ structures from pigs to help human patients is not new. Pig heart valves -- removed of cells -- have been used for more than three decades to provide heart valve replacements in human patients.

"It is important to identify new sources of transplantable organs because of the critical shortage of donor organs," said lead author Giuseppe Orlando, M.D., an instructor in surgery and regenerative medicine at Wake Forest Baptist. "These kidneys maintain their innate three-dimensional architecture, as well as their vascular system, and may represent the ideal platform for kidney engineering."

For the research, pig kidneys were soaked in a detergent to remove all cells, leaving behind the organ's "skeleton," including its system of blood vessels. In addition, the structure of the nephron -- the kidney's functional unit -- was maintained. The scaffolds were implanted in animals, where they were re-filled with blood and were able to maintain normal blood pressure, proving that the process of removing cells doesn't affect the mechanical strength of the vessels.

"There are many challenges to be met before this system could be used to engineer replacement kidneys, including problems with blood clots forming in the vessels," said Anthony Atala, M.D., co-author and director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine. "The kidney is a very complex organ with at least 22 different cell types."

But, the fact that nephron structure is maintained suggests the potential to re-populate the kidney with cells, according to the scientists. They speculate that new cells introduced into the scaffold would recognize their natural niche through physical or chemical signals of the scaffold.

While the project is in its infancy, the idea represents a potential solution to the extreme shortage of donor kidneys. According to the authors, the probability in the U.S. of receiving a kidney transplant within five years of being added to the waiting list is less than 35 percent. As of late August 2011, nearly 90,000 patients in the U.S. were waiting for kidney transplants.

The science of regenerative medicine has already had success engineering skin, cartilage, bladders, urine tubes, trachea and blood vessels in the lab that were successfully implanted in patients. These structures were able to receive oxygen and nutrients from nearby vascularized tissues until they developed their own blood vessel supply.

However, the "holy grail" of regenerative medicine is to engineer more complex organs such as the kidney, liver, heart and pancreas. These organs are very dense with cells and must have their own oxygen supply to survive. This need for a scaffold with a full vasculature is why scientists are exploring the possibility of removing cells from donor organs and replacing them with a patient's own cells.

Scientists have already used scaffolds from rodents or pigs to engineer heart, liver, lung and intestinal scaffolds. When re-populated with organ-specific cells, these "organoids" were able to produce some of the functions of native organs in the lab. The goal of the current study is to produce kidney scaffolds from the pig because of similarities to humans in terms of organ structure and size.

The research was supported by the Telemedicine & Advanced Technology Research Center.

More From ScienceDaily

More Health & Medicine News

Featured Research

Mar. 3, 2015 — Limp or firm, your handshake conveys subliminal social cues. Now, research reveals it also transmits chemical signals that could explain why the greeting evolved in the first ... full story

Mar. 3, 2015 — Loneliness brought about by the death of a spouse can trigger a wider network of depression-like symptoms, a study has found, but authors suggest that doctors are often too quick to attribute these ... full story

Mar. 3, 2015 — Family Based Interpersonal Psychotherapy (FB-IPT) is more effective in treating preadolescent children with depression compared to child-centered therapy (CCT), a recent study has found. ... full story

Mar. 3, 2015 — Two of the four known groups of human AIDS viruses (HIV-1 groups O and P) have originated in western lowland gorillas, according to new research. The scientists conducted a comprehensive survey of ... full story

Mar. 3, 2015 — Scientists have succeeded in producing cartilage formed from embryonic stem cells that could in future be used to treat the painful joint condition osteoarthritis. With their huge capacity to ... full story

Mar. 3, 2015 — Everyone worries about losing their memory as they grow older—memory loss remains one of the most common complaints of the elderly. But the molecular reasons behind the processes remain unclear, ... full story

Mar. 3, 2015 — A strong link has been made between subthreshold manic episodes and likelihood of developing bipolar disorder in children of parents with bipolar disorder. The study’s findings could improve ... full story

Mar. 2, 2015 — Despite sharp increases in spending on cancer treatment, cancer mortality rates in the United States have decreased only modestly since 1970, a study has found. "Our results suggest that cancer care ... full story

Mar. 2, 2015 — In the first study of its kind since the 1920s, rats in New York City were found to carry a flea species capable of transmitting plague pathogens. Among them: 500-plus Oriental rat fleas, notorious ... full story

Mar. 2, 2015 — A newly published study is the first to report an association between bisphenol-A (BPA), a common plasticizer used in a variety of consumer food and beverage containers, with autism spectrum disorder ... full story

Featured Videos

Mom Triumphs Over Tragedy, Helps Other Families

AP (Mar. 3, 2015) — After her son, Dax, died from a rare form of leukemia, Julie Locke decided to give back to the doctors at St. Jude Children&apos;s Research Hospital who tried to save his life. She raised $1.6M to help other patients and their families. (March 3)
Video provided by AP

Woman Convicted of Poisoning Son

AP (Mar. 3, 2015) — A woman who blogged for years about her son&apos;s constant health woes was convicted Monday of poisoning him to death by force-feeding heavy concentrations of sodium through his stomach tube. (March 3)
Video provided by AP

Related Stories

Sep. 9, 2014 — Working with human-sized pig kidneys, researchers have developed the most successful method to date to keep blood vessels in the new organs open and flowing with blood. This is a significant hurdle ... full story

May 20, 2013 — Nearly 20 percent of kidneys that are recovered from deceased donors in the U.S. are refused for transplant due to factors ranging from scarring in small blood vessels of the kidney’s filtering ... full story

Jan. 8, 2013 — Ocular Systems, Inc. (OSI), Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center and the North Carolina Eye Bank have formed a new company based on a promising new technology aimed at engineering replacement corneas ... full story

May 10, 2011 — A new study sheds light on what causes certain kidneys to do better than others after being transplanted, providing doctors with an easy way to screen for donor kidneys that have the best chance of ... full story

Oct. 30, 2010 — Researchers have reached an early, but important, milestone in the quest to grow replacement livers in the lab. They are the first to use human liver cells to successfully engineer miniature livers ... full story

ScienceDaily features breaking news and videos about the latest discoveries in health, technology, the environment, and more -- from major news services and leading universities, scientific journals, and research organizations.